[WIP] Studio: Greeble

[Rob Oplawar]

Bump.

I want to discuss a certain aspect of my framework with anyone experienced in PHP.

The Article module is relatively simple compared to some of my other planned modules, and yet its execution time is starting to get up there. To view an article, 20 separate PHP files need to be loaded and parsed.

Here is a tree structure representing the files that are loaded, how long they took to load, and which files loaded them in the first place.

120ms:                  index.php
      8ms:              Control/framework.php
            0ms:        Control/config.php
            1ms:        MySQLiSession.php
            0ms:        framework language file: en-US
      106ms:            Article renderer
            4ms:        Article/Control/Scripts.php
                  3ms:  Article language file: en-US
            15ms:       Article/Model/Article.php
                  0ms:  Article/Control/config.php
                  5ms:  DBRow.php
                  4ms:  DBTreeRow.php
            2ms:        User/Model/User.php
                  0ms:  User/Control/config.php
                  0ms:  User language file: en-US
            3ms:        Article/Model/ArticleCategory.php
            1ms:        HTML.php
            1ms:        User/View/Templates.php
            3ms:        Article/View/Templates.php
            4ms:        Form.php

To put it in more readable english,

the initial view script (the page requested by the client browser) loads:
   Greeble framework, which loads:
      framework configuration
      MySQL session handler
      framework language file
   Article renderer, which loads:
      Article control scripts (a bunch of logic, input validation, etc), which loads
         Article language file
      Article Class Definition, which loads
         Article configuration file
         Database abstraction class
         Database tree structure abstraction class
      User class definition, which loads
         User configuration file
         User Language file
      Article Category class definition
      base HTML templating class
      User templating class
      Article templating class
      Form templating class

Obviously, in this example, the article render script is the biggest timesuck by far. The files it depends on take a total of 36 milliseconds to execute (and that execution time is basically just the time it takes to compile, as all those files just contain class/function/constant definitions), so on its own it's spending 70 milliseconds doing its thing.

Keep in mind this is running on my windows machine with Firefox, AIM, iTunes, and Eclipse running in addition to Apache with PHP, which are all notorious memory hogs. It runs on average about twice as fast on my linux laptop, and considerably faster on my production server.



So, I dunno, I guess I'm asking what your impressions are of this.
My first impression is "gosh, Greeble's getting kind of bloated... "